“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go sit through more political screaming.”
There was a flash of greenish-white light as Grianne toppled backward off the railing and was gone. Sometimes I feel like we hang out with too many teleporters.
It didn’t take long to walk back to the dining room where we’d been served our first, abandoned dinner. It was empty. The tables had been cleaned, and the lights were turned down low, presumably so no one would get confused and try to come here for the conclave. There was a strange sound as we stepped through the door, like the distant rustle of skeleton leaves, or the beating of a thousand autumn leaf wings on the wind. My heart dropped into my stomach. I knew that sound. It stopped almost instantly, but it was too late. I’d already heard it.
I stopped and spread my arms, keeping Quentin and Karen from moving forward. They were good kids. Better yet, they had both known me long enough that when I indicated that I needed them to stay where they were, they froze immediately.
“What is it?” asked Quentin.
“That sound,” I said. “Did you hear it? When we first came in.”
“Dead leaves,” he said. “The whole place is decorated in redwoods. There’s going to be some settling, especially when there’s no one talking to cover it up.”
“Redwoods don’t have leaves, you doof,” said Karen. “They’re evergreens.”
“Just stay here, both of you.” I stepped forward, wishing I’d been allowed to bring my knife; wishing I wasn’t walking, unarmed, into a large, empty dining hall where I’d heard—or thought that I’d heard—the beating of the night-haunts’ wings. It hadn’t been loud enough to have placed them in this room. They were approaching. But why?
Something crunched underfoot. I glanced down to be sure that it was neither glass nor bone, and saw that I’d stepped on what looked like the shell of some large egg. Nothing to worry about, then. I resumed my forward progress, and stopped again as something else crunched. This time, I knelt and picked up a piece of what I’d stepped on.
It was thin, curved, and brittle as an old snail’s shell, colored like carnival glass and patterned with thin whorls and swirls, as distinctive as a fingerprint. I frowned, trying to figure out where I had seen this before, and why it looked so familiar.
The answer came to me on the beating of the night-haunts’ wings, still distant, still impossible to ignore. I was holding the shell of a broken Merry Dancer.
I was holding proof that King Antonio Robertson of Angels was dead.
“Stay where you are, kids,” I said, staring at the broken shell in my hand. “Quentin, I know you’ve been working on illumination spells. Can you throw me a globe of witch-light please?” Casting a spell inside Arden’s knowe might be enough to get her attention, or at least the attention of a member of her staff. That wouldn’t be a bad thing. This wasn’t the sort of situation that I could handle on my own.
“Okay,” said Quentin. He murmured something incomprehensible. The scent of heather and steel washed over the room and a globe of light appeared above me. It looked distressingly like one of Antonio’s Merry Dancers, before they had been broken, save for the fact that it didn’t dance or weave; it just hung there, casting a cool white light over everything below it.
Thin, glittering shards littered the floor, like someone had smashed a giant Christmas ornament. The point of impact was somewhere ahead of me. I started gingerly forward, careful to avoid as many of the shards as possible. I didn’t want to destroy the evidence before I’d had a chance to really look at it. Quentin’s ball of witch-light caught on the shards, making them easier to see.
After five steps, I found King Antonio.
He was sprawled in a way that mostly hid his body under one of the dining tables; if not for the shards of Merry Dancer scattered everywhere, it would have been easy to write him off as a shadow cast by the intersection of curtain and wall. With Quentin’s mage-light to brighten the scene, and the curved shell in my hand, it was impossible for me to pretend he was anything but what he was. A corpse.
The night-haunts hadn’t arrived yet. We’d interrupted them before they could descend and devour the evidence. That was a good thing, in a way; it’s easier to examine a body when there actually is one. I knelt, looking carefully at what had once been King Antonio Robinson of Angels. It wasn’t hard to guess what killed him. Purebloods can be difficult to kill, but on the whole, a rosewood spike through the chest will stop virtually any of us where we stand. His eyes were open, staring in silent horror at the table above him.
“Huh,” I said.
On the other side of the room, Karen gasped. It was a squeak of a sound, barely worthy of the name, but it was enough to warn me. I went still, just before the tip of a sword was laid against the back of my neck.
Please be Lowri, I thought, and said, “Hi. Who’s about to decapitate me?”
“October, why are you kneeling over the body of a dead king?” Lowri sounded more puzzled than angry. That wasn’t going to last. “What have you done?”
“Nothing. May I stand?”
“Keep your hands where I can see them, and make no sudden moves. I won’t kill you, but I’d hate to remove your arms.”
I believed her when she said that. Lowri was reasonably fond of me, even if we weren’t friends. Plus cutting my arms off would really contaminate the scene. Still, I moved carefully as I straightened, the piece of broken Merry Dancer in my right hand, and turned to face the head of Arden’s guard.
Lowri had traded her customary and ceremonial spear for a proper sword, one which was too close to me for comfort. There were two more guards behind her. I knew neither of them by name. Quentin and Karen were still on the far side of the room, near the door we had entered through. That made me feel a little better. They could duck out if things got bad. Quentin was good enough at navigating the back halls of most knowes that I had faith in his ability to keep them safe, and Tybalt would come to find them, eventually. I trusted him to do that.
“What did you do?” asked Lowri, modifying her question only slightly. Her eyes went to the piece of Merry Dancer in my hand.
Holding it probably made me look guilty, but dropping it was out of the question. It would shatter, and I didn’t know whether that was disrespectful to the Candela, or whether it would be dishonoring his memory. All I could do was hold the empty shell of what he’d been, and hope that I’d be able to talk my way out of the situation.
“I left the dining room when people started shouting,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I took my niece and squire with me, because they’re my responsibility, and as long as that’s the case, I won’t leave them in a room full of angry nobles.” Quentin officially had no title until he left my custodianship. Karen was a changeling whose parents didn’t even serve a noble house. My taking them with me wasn’t just logical, it was practically required. To do anything else would have been to fail in my duties.
“That doesn’t explain why we’ve found you here, standing over the body of a dead king,” said Lowri.
The scent of blackberry flowers and redwood bark teased my nostrils. I relaxed slightly. “We had dinner on the balcony at the end of the adjoining servant’s hall,” I said. “The kitchen staff should be able to confirm that we were fed out there. After we were finished, Sir Grianne of Shadowed Hills came to tell us the conclave was resuming. Since we were on the balcony, we had to come through here to get back to the gallery. Upon entering, I heard a strange noise, and went to investigate. That’s pretty much everything that happened. You found me right after I found him.”